Designing for Elasticity

One of the great advantages of the public cloud is its elasticity, the ability it gives systems to provision and deprovision resources as workloads increase and decrease. Much has been written about how building RESTful services is crucial to deploying elastic services in the cloud. I concur that writing code loosely coupled with the underlying …

Something Is Wrong: It Must Be the Hypervisor!

Something is wrong—it must be the hypervisor! If you work in any virtual or cloud environments, how many times have you heard that statement as soon as any kind of problem surfaces? Way back when during the twentieth century, as a problem deflection, the network would immediately be blamed. As we got into the twenty-first century, virtualization …

OpenShift, Why Won’t You Do What I Want?

I recently spent a fruitless afternoon on the public PaaS version of Cloud Foundry. In this post, I document an equally fruitless afternoon spent on Red Hat’s OpenShift. It think it is fair to say that OpenShift has some advantages over Cloud Foundry for public PaaS. OpenShift feels more comfortable, its integration of a build …

Dell Fluid Cache for SAN

Back in mid-2011, Dell acquired RNA Networks, a small startup out of Portland, Oregon. At the time Dell purchased it, RNA had a product, MVX, that employed three different ways to pool memory across multiple servers in order to accelerate workloads. One was a way to pool memory as a storage cache in order to …

4 Reasons The Calxeda Shutdown Isn’t Surprising

The board of Calxeda, the company trying to bring low-power ARM CPUs to the server market, has voted to cease operations in the wake of a failed round of financing. This is completely unsurprising to me, for a few different reasons. Virtualization is more suited to the needs of IT Calxeda’s view of the world …

Expand Your Thinking When Architecting in the Cloud

I have been building solutions on AWS since 2008, and even though that sounds like a long time, I have still only scratched the surface of what is possible in the cloud. Every few weeks I get another “Aha” moment when I see problems solved with cloud architectures that would be either too hard, not …